Why Snorkeling Sucks (and why it doesn't have to)

Many months ago, I was introducing myself to a coworker and I mentioned that one of my hobbies was snorkeling. The response I got back:

"Tell me - why do haole people like snorkeling?"

At the time, I wasn't sure what to say. I've been snorkeling for a very long time, I first snorkeled in Hawaii when I was still a kid and came here on vacation, and I've snorkeled in the Florida Keys and on Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island as well. In fact, it was snorkeling on Kauai a couple years back that reignited my passion for the water. I've always thought of it as a really fun thing to do, so the idea that it would require explanation never entered my mind.

After about a year of messing around and mostly going to the same places, I think I understand. Snorkeling kinda sucks. Here is why I say this:

1. It's unadventurous. Snorkeling tends to be done in the same sort of places, typically shallower areas like the inside of Hanauma Bay, and safety and ease tend to go first. It's exciting if you've never done it, in fact for many people it's too much, but generally snorkelers don't aim for big adventure. They want to see pretty tropical fish, which brings me to the second point
2. It's uninformed. I would hazard a guess that more tourists snorkel than locals here in Hawaii, at least in terms of sheer numbers. The average tourist is here for a very short time, maybe a week or two, and most of them are from places like Japan or the mainland (US). They snorkel on vacation, and the limit of their knowledge is usually what they can find on a "fish ID" chart after the fact (often a rather confusing plastic chart with drawings rather than photos). 
3. The gear sucks. Most snorkel gear is rented, most snorkelers don't use it except on vacation, and so most of it is not ideal for the snorkeler. On a snorkel boat, you will probably get the most simple and low-maintenance gear. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that usually one piece or other of the equipment is less than ideal. "Less than ideal" might be fine for vacation, but it hardly encourages you to enjoy snorkeling. A fogging mask, ill fitting fins, or a leaky snorkel will put you off even if you LOVE the fish and coral.
4. There is no room for advancement. Snorkeling is a non-sport. It's usually viewed as an "activity", or if you go by YouTube's tag, it's an "industry". You do it as part of hanging out at the beach. You don't have to learn the fish, you don't have to swim well, and at most you will take some so-so pictures with a cheap camera. The expectations are low, but once you start going out every week, you start thinking, "where am I going with this?"
5. It gets no respect. Mostly due to the above factors, few locals want to say they are a "snorkeler". Heck, even scuba divers who snorkel as much as they dive will still call themselves "divers". Freedivers and spearfishers (two overlapping but not entirely identical groups) will never refer to themselves are snorkelers, even when that's what they are actually doing most of the time in the water - swimming on the surface, looking for fish. Magazines for snorkeling aren't on the racks at 7-11 here, but Hawaii Skin Diver, Hawaii Fishing News and Scuba Diving Magazine are all fairly easy to find.

The thing about all these complaints is that none of them have to be true about snorkeling. My own path in snorkeling has been a move from simple "leisure" snorkeling to increasingly more adventurous and informed snorkeling. One of the first things I did was get better gear. In any case, to make snorkeling better and more fun, pretty much all of the above has to flip:

1. Snorkeling is an adventure. Part of the reason I made this blog was to challenge myself. I want to see more of the island, and I want to explore new places. Snorkeling is a great way to take a peek at an exciting world very different from the one on land. Snorkeling outside of the break, snorkeling farther from shore, these things are exciting.
2. Snorkeling is a perfect way to learn about the reef. Getting past the "fish ID" charts, there are resources like Keoki Stender's excellent site to start from. There are also excellent guides which group the fish by family, which is one of the best ways to learn about them. I have taught myself the fish from the most common ones on out. By snorkeling, I've seen there is a different world inside and outside the break - for example, the Humuhumunukunukuapua'a is a shallow water fish that loves the inside but is less common the deeper you get. I've only started to learn about the fish, but snorkeling so far has shown me quite a bit.
3. Good gear is not hard to find, and worth every penny. The single best purchase I have ever made for snorkeling was buying a Cressi Pano 4 mask at McCully Bikes. It was about $35 but it fits my face perfectly and does not leak or fog (though I did clean it very thoroughly with toothpaste when I bought it). Different people have different faces, so you should always try on a mask before you buy it. Sometimes it helps to look a bit outside of the "gear made for snorkeling" box - my favorite fins are a pair of Churchill Makapu'u, which are usually thought of as bodyboarding fins.
4. Snorkeling (especially combined with freediving) has the potential to be as broad and deep a sport as scuba. Snorkeling has the advantage in shallow water, but there is no reason to limit snorkeling to the shallows. People are willing to freedive even at Lanai Lookout, and scuba divers will drift dive from there into Hanauma Bay. Heck, swim clubs here on Oahu sometimes go around Na Mokulua, and the Waikiki Roughwater Swim each year covers the breadth of Waikiki from Sans Souci to the Hilton. While obviously knowledge must be appropriate to the place, care must be taken, and the danger increases as the level increases, why should snorkelers leave many places to people carrying a spear or wearing tanks? 
5. Snorkeling deserves respect. It shouldn't just be a tourist thing, or haole thing, or something divers do but consider as an aside to diving. 

I hope I can show a different side to snorkeling with my videos, and help expand snorkeling from its current state. Adventure awaits!

Waikiki Part 1, Waikiki MLCD off Queen's beach

Last Saturday, I went out with Russell and Risa and took some video at the Waikiki MLCD. This area is my "local" beach (since I live in town), and it's also the area I go to the most and know the best. Beyond that, the snorkeling here was the seed that prompted this blog and my current video adventures.

Perhaps I should say, it was half of what caused me to make this blog.

The Waikiki MLCD was one of the places that formed my "baseline" for what a reef should look like. The other was Three Tables in the Pupukea MLCD, which is different since it is in the country and the coral is still very healthy. I knew enough to expect the reef to have a lot of algae and be mostly dead (it's in a city, I'm not expecting a cathedral), but I was surprised to find that it still was full of life. I didn't realize I was setting myself up for a fall by going there, but I went out to Lanikai and snorkeled there... Only to be tremendously dissapointed by the fact that there were no big fish, and very few fish at all in comparison, despite much more healthy coral! When I found similar conditions next to the Makai pier, I decided I was going to find out the truth about Oahu reefs and get the public to see it.

The Waikiki MLCD has been protected for 25 years, and it shows. There are lots of fish, many surgeonfish and uhu (parrotfish), and on the outside there are many reef predators, specifically 'omilu (bluefin trevally) and kaku (barracuda). I've seen some of them in Hanauma bay, but surprisingly I see much larger schools in the Waikiki MLCD, and I have never seen as many kaku, or 'omilu as large anywhere else.

You can snorkel in the shallow reef right off the beach at Queen's (in front of the Banyan tree and beach volleyball), and you will see many fish, but if you go out past the buoys on the ewa side and follow along the outer reef toward Diamond Head you will really find something special.

Here is a bit of what it's like:

The shocking thing, really, is that this is Waikiki. This is Waikiki! If somebody with more skill and experience was behind the camera, this could be a documentary... There really are fish everywhere, so much so that in 30 minutes of footage there were very few times when there was not at least one fish in view. But this is Waikiki, a dead reef in front of an overdeveloped "theme park" (well, to be fair this is at the end of the developed area and in front of Kapiolani park, but still). And it looks as good, maybe even better than Hanauma bay! The reef IS mostly dead, but the fish sure are alive.

What this says to me is that almost no place on Oahu or in Hawaii is doomed to being "barren". It also tells me that tourism is not the main problem. It says that even a degraded area can come back to life if given protection.

I'm not sure what all the answers are, but I am sure that this small patch of protected reef says more about what a healthy reef can be than Hanauma bay or even Pupukea. It's alive in the face of degraded habitat and invasive algae, despite sitting in front of the city, and in the face of any tourist or local who puts on a mask or goggles and sticks his head under the water. And it's the real deal, with BIG 'omilu and kaku and weke 'ula and kala bigger than dinner plates.

It's the reason I have to snorkel around Oahu. I want to find more places like it, and I want everyone to know that there COULD be more places like it, all around the island, if we decided to hold reef ecosystems as a sacred trust and treat reefs as living things. I'm going to go look for places like this, because I know they should exist all over on Oahu. And I'm going to call for us to try to create places like this around Oahu. I'm not out to take away everyone's favorite fishing spot, or tell people not to fish and eat fish (I love fish myself and have since I was a child), but I AM going to say that we need this, and we need it everywhere on the island, not just in a tiny patch off Waikiki.

Hawaiian fish names, common names, and scientific names

Before I really start blogging, I want to start with one thing - I will probably be using a lot of Hawaiian fish names. In my first video, I also used the so-called "common" names of the fish as well, but I will be trying to use the Hawaiian names where I can. Why?

For me, as a transplant here in Hawaii, I have a sort of foreign perspective - I didn't grow up here, so I don't know all these places the way a local would. But I fell in love with it and I have lived here for a while (more than 5 years now, though on and off). The reef ecosystem in particular is something that has captured me. I love the fish, the urchins, I get excited even seeing healthy coral, I love the adventure of finding new places. One part of that was to actually learn what I was seeing.

I am still very much in the middle of that process, but right at the beginning I decided to learn the Hawaiian names of things. My original motivation was to be able to understand the spearfisherman and locals, who use Hawaiian names. I was going to spearfish myself... Before I got a bit sidetracked. However, using the Hawaiian names has come to mean more than that to me. I am here on Oahu and I am looking at the life in Oahu. It's a bit absurd that I would use English names for fish here, isn't it? English itself is a language from a temperate island in the North Atlantic. I'm in the tropics in the middle of the Pacific ocean! 

The names of things matter. For scientific purposes, using scientific names is essential. A scientific name is (ideally) a pointer to a specific living thing, and designates the relationship of that living thing to other living things. A "common" name in English puts a certain claim on the things named - that they somehow belong to a world where English is the "correct" way to name things. Yet these things already had names, just as the place has a name, and just as trees like koa and 'ohi'a have names. For ocean life, it's complicated by the fact that each of these fish gets a different name in every place, so a fish with a worldwide distribution like kahala (greater amberjack) will have dozens of names in dozens of languages. Still, it makes sense to use the Hawaiian names here. Doubly so for endemic species which are only found here, like kumu.

I won't say this as an absolute - I will use the common name HERE. When I talk about menpachi I will call them menpachi because that's what they are commonly called here, though their "proper" Hawaiian name is 'u'u. When I talk about moray eels, I am going to use a "common" name or scientific name because Hawaiian calls them all "puhi" without differentiating between different species much, and the same with butterfly fish which only have a few names. I'm also going to be lax and write without proper 'okina (I'll use an apostrophe) and omitting the kahako (at least until I figure out how to put them in). But I am going to use the Hawaiian names just the same. 

One great site exists about the sea life of Hawaii, a site that I can't say enough good things about: Marinelife Photography by Keoki Stender. Scientific, "common" English names, Hawaiian names, and sometimes Japanese names are included. All of the names of the fish I learned from this excellent site.

Test post - Waikiki part 0, Hilton Hawaiian Village

My first video is up. As per the title of this blog, I intend to snorkel around Oahu and find out what is there, what isn't there, what places are beautiful, what places are ugly, and in general bring Oahu reefs and ocean life into view as a whole. Other issues I may cover in this blog are conservation, fishing, snorkeling, freediving, fish and their habits, laws and how people experience the ocean.

My first video is of a trip off the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki. There are few large fish in the inner reef, and the fish obviously are wary of humans, but there are some very healthy coral formations after you get past the rubble at about 200 yards. Also, I count any day that I see a moray as a good day, and indeed I found a snowflake moray!

It's a short selection from about an hour of snorkeling. We went out to the break but not really beyond it. I plan at some point to get a better view of the outside reef, but I need a dive flag and would like to have a useable float at least. Perhaps a kayak would be best for getting there.

Waikiki itself is seemingly small but a world of its own. The Hilton has a large beach, unusual for Waikiki since they built far, far too close to the water in most of Waikiki (in an example of the shortsightedness and foolishness often on display when money is involved). There were a few people snorkeling but I think we may have been the only ones out so far - though one person near the beach when we came in had a float and flag. I suspect they either came in earlier or were going to leave when we came in. Too bad for the tourists, there IS something to see if you can swim a bit. For a place that most people here would never associate with "nice snorkeling" it was better than expected.